A friend, a patriot, a good man to all

Frank Carvill was 51 when he went to war. In notes home, he talks of support for the mission and relief he dind't fire his weapon. He describes Baghdad's beauties and perils, and he shares his greatest desire of all -- to come home.

Sunday, June 13,
2004

BY TOM FEENEY

Star-Ledger Staff

He shipped out to Iraq for his first taste of combat a year after he became eligible to join the AARP. At Fort Dix before he left, the young men in the regular Army competed for the best times on the obstacle course. At age 51, Frank Carvill told his friends he was happy just to make it through.

A student deferment in the early 1970s helped Carvill avoid Vietnam but left him with an unfulfilled sense of duty. He called his friend Rick Rancitelli one night in 1984 and asked for a ride to basic training. He was joining the Army National Guard, he said.

"I don't think he ever thought he'd end up in a place like Iraq, much less in a war," said another friend, Rob Snyder.

But that's exactly where he was on June 4 when he was killed in an ambush in the part of Baghdad known as Sadr City.

During the more than three months before his death, Carvill had written dozens of e-mails and letters to a group of college buddies. The messages and letters provide an extraordinarily thoughtful and candid look at one American soldier's experiences in Iraq.

They reveal a man who believed in the mission, despite misgivings about the initial invasion and concerns about the cost.

They reveal a man who was enchanted by the terrible beauty of a war-torn ancient city and spooked by the relentless threat of the dangers it held at night.

And they reveal a man who yearned to once again enjoy a cold beer and a thick steak and the company of friends back home.

"I wish none of this were necessary," he wrote in a May 1 letter to Rancitelli. "Most of the time we come and go without incident, but the risk is always there, so you can never relax. I try to read as much as I can and hang out in the coffee shop on the post to get away from the Army environment. I can't wait to get out of here and get out of uniform."

The National Guardsman, who was buried yesterday after a funeral Mass at St. Joseph Church in East Rutherford, grew up in Carlstadt as one of four children in a house built by his father, Dan, an Irish immigrant who worked as a mason.

Carvill never married. He lived for many years in New York City but moved back to the house in Carlstadt after his father's death in 1996 to help his mother, Mary, who is legally blind.

Carvill earned a degree in political science from Livingston College of Rutgers University in 1975. While he was there, he fell in with a group of students with whom he would remain close friends the rest of his life. One of those friends, Steve Zurier, was saving Carvill's letters and e-mails from Iraq in the vague hope Carvill might someday write a book about his experience in Iraq. Zurier made the writings available to The Star-Ledger.

"I first noticed him at some sort of political lecture that we attended in the dorm," said Snyder, the director of journalism and media studies at Rutgers-Newark. "I see this guy in a ski jacket with a very full beard who looks very rugged and uses a million-dollar vocabulary to talk about politics. My first thought was, 'Is this guy one of the Kennedys?'"

TRUCKER TURNED PARALEGAL

Carvill drove a truck for a moving company after college before going to work as a paralegal. He worked in that capacity with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey at the time of his death.

Though he didn't use his political science degree in his work, his passion for the subject never waned. It was most apparent in the work he did for various Irish-American causes. He was a founder of the Irish Immigration Reform Movement, a group that agitated for reforms in the 1980s, and treasurer for the Emerald Isle Immigration Center.

His death merited a news story and an editorial last week in the Irish Echo newspaper. "His work on behalf of the Irish community in the New York area and beyond was virtually the stuff of legend," the editorial read. "This world would simply grind to a halt without people like him. Well, it's moving a little slower now."

Carvill read voraciously and talked passionately about the politics in New York and Washington, D.C., his friends say. He would find an article in a newspaper or in a political magazine, clip it and send it along, sometimes without explanation.

"He had an extraordinarily subtle mind when it came to talking about politics," Snyder said. "I used to go skiing with him, and we would have these long lift rides when he would analyze the presidential race or a mayoral race with extraordinary insight."

He was an unabashed liberal and no fan of President Bush. In his letters and e-mails from Iraq, he expresses support for Democrat John Kerry and concern that Ralph Nader's candidacy would ultimately help Bush. He worried in one message that Kerry was making a mistake by using his service in Vietnam in his campaign.

"Many male baby boom voters skipped the war through various deferments and now feel mildly uncomfortable about it," he wrote in a May 10 e-mail to Zurier. "Many others joined the reserves, then a haven from active duty. They also are disconnected from Kerry's Vietnam record. Women and those too young to have been directly affected by the war must find his ads self serving, to say the least. The collective national memory of the Vietnam War is probably negative. Thus, the association with it is not good."

His views on the war in Iraq were nuanced.

He opposed the invasion but was in favor of a continued American presence. He worried the financial and human costs of the American presence would erode public support for it at home.

"The U.S. simply has to persevere, as there are few viable alternatives in the near future," he wrote to Zurier. "If we leave soon, the very people we removed from power and who are fighting us still will return to run the country."

YEARNING TO SERVE

Carvill was one of about 150 soldiers in the 3rd Battalion, 112th Field Artillery called to active duty. Most volunteered. The group deployed to Iraq in February after spending a month in training at Fort Dix. They were sent over as military police officers, a specialty in short supply.

His friends said he probably could have begged off the assignment because he had served 20 years in the National Guard as of April.

"He definitely had some guilt about not serving in Vietnam, and he wanted to give back," Zurier said. "He was dedicated to what they were doing there, but he wasn't some kind of gung-ho, mega-patriot."

His announcement that he was going to be activated and deployed caught his friends by surprise.

He was a rugged guy who loved the outdoors, who loved the water and who had a certain sense of adventure. Once he and Snyder paddled a canoe around Manhattan.

He was a guy who had survived close calls in his life -- he was at the World Trade Center during both attacks.

And he was a guy who kept himself in reasonably good shape.

But the fact remained he was a middle-age man going off to do work normally left to young men.

"Someone that age -- we should have enough young guys to go and serve, or enough older guys with experience," Zurier said. "He was 51, and he was a part-timer."

Even as Carvill was being deployed, Rancitelli believed he might draw an assignment that would keep him out of harm's way.

"I just figured since he's an older cat, he'll be sitting somewhere pushing papers and letting the young guys bust the doors down," said Rancitelli of Caldwell.

In fact, as the letters and e-mails he sent to his friends made clear, he was very much in harm's way.

He had two primary assignments.

The first was as a driver and occasionally a gunner in a convoy of two or three armored Humvees. The convoys ferried supplies and escorted people around the city.

They are an inviting target for Iraqis angry about the American occupation -- targets for rocket-propelled grenades or improvised explosive devices left by the side of road. Vehicles occupied by members of Carvill's unit had been hit several times even before the fatal ambushes last weekend that left Carvill and three other New Jersey soldiers dead.

"The trucks have held up well, but the ordnance has been relatively small," he wrote to Rancitelli on May 1. "If you run into an anti-tank mine or artillery shell, then you might have a problem."

The second assignment was to provide assistance to the Iraqi police. The police are a target of the insurgents because they are viewed as traitors.

Some of Carvill's friends worried he was too kind to survive combat.

"If it comes down to kill or be killed, Frank's in trouble because he can't kill another person," said Norma Murgado-Carroll, the wife of another of Carvill's college buddies, Bob Carroll. "That's just how I felt. He was such a gentle person."

Indeed, in one of the letters home, Carvill expressed relief he didn't have to fire his weapon. He described a night when he was assigned to guard a police station. He and another soldier were sent out on the roof of a 10-story government building next door. With binoculars and night-vision goggles, they scanned the area for snipers or other armed insurgents. Their orders were to shoot them on sight.

"They never showed and/or we couldn't see them," he wrote to Rancitelli on May 1, "which was OK by me."

A BEAUTIFUL CITY

Carvill told friends he was fascinated by the beauty of Baghdad, even amid war and ruin and epic poverty.

He wrote about the view one morning from a bridge over the Tigris River. The city at ground level was obscured by fog and by the fetid smoke from garbage burning in the streets, he said, but he could see the tops of the palm trees and the domes and minarets of the mosques.

And he wrote about the streetscape in the older sections of the city -- about the alleyways lined with shops and apartment buildings, about women in traditional clothing, about sheep butchers and sheep herders, about horse and donkey carts, about abandoned vehicles and disassembled appliances.

"Without this ... war, it would be fun to cruise around town," he wrote to Rancitelli. "Maybe I'm still a naive liberal, but I don't feel paranoid here, at least during the day."

Carvill was killed on a sunny afternoon in just such a section of town.

He was in a two-vehicle convoy that was taking supplies to an Iraqi police station.

A rocket-propelled grenade exploded into his Humvee, scattering shrapnel across the road in the Sadr City slum. The vehicle burst into flames. Three soldiers were seriously injured. Carvill and Spc. Christopher Duffy of Brick, and two National Guardsmen from Oregon were killed.

As his friends mourned him last week, they were reminded of the many things that set him apart.

Norma Murgado-Carroll thought about her wedding in 1997. Carvill was the best man, so it fell to him to make a toast. He nearly brought the house down.

Carvill knew Murgado only casually then, but he was aware her family was Cuban-American. He took that into account when he made the toast. He spoke in fluent Spanish, discussed the political situation in Cuba and concluded with a rallying cry often heard in the Cuban-American community -- "Que viva Cuba libre," or "Let Cuba be free."

"The place was roaring," said Murgado-Carroll, who practices law in Elizabeth with her husband. "My family just loved him because they thought, 'Here's this guy who has nothing to do with the Cuban-American community who took the time to do this for us.' It was very touching."

Rancitelli, a graphic artist who designs labels for wine bottles, thought about being 21 years old and learning a friend had died, the first time in his life he had lost someone close to him. Carvill put him in a car and drove through the night from New Jersey to Pennsylvania and back again, trying to cheer him up.

"I'm not saying he was perfect," Rancitelli said. "He had his share of screw-ups. But we were always just happy we knew him. He was one of those people who made your mind bubble."

And Zurier thought about when he relocated to New York state to take a job as a newspaper reporter. Carvill had encouraged him to pursue a career in journalism because he liked the way he wrote. That job, though, didn't work out, and Zurier quit after only a short time. Carvill drove up in his moving truck, helped Zurier pack his belongings and let him gripe about the job the whole way home.

This spring, a small box from Iraq arrived at the Zurier house in Columbia, Md. Inside was a wine goblet Carvill had bought from a vendor in Baghdad and sent to Zurier's son Solomon as a bar mitzvah gift, along with a letter congratulating Solomon and wishing him good luck.

"He's in a war and he takes the time to buy a bar mitzvah gift for my son," said Zurier, who now works as an editor at a trade magazine. "Who does that?"

In fact, the letters and e-mails suggest Carvill spent a lot of time in Iraq thinking about his friends back home.

They are not all about politics and war.

He included a few friendly wisecracks. To Zurier, the father of two sons, he wrote, "Do something with the boys this summer before they realize you are not cool."

And they include questions about family and about summer plans. He wanted to know how the Zurier bar mitzvah had gone and how Rancitelli was doing in his search for a new house.

And nearly all of them end with a reference to something they would do together when he got home -- usually something simple like grill a steak or drink a beer.

In one e-mail, sent at the end of March, he reminded Rancitelli they had made plans to visit some Civil War battle sites in Virginia when he got home.

"Looking forward to crossing the Potomac River to see the clean green fields and hills of Virginia and the ghosts of the Civil War," he wrote. "Good men all."

Tom Feeney can be reached at (732) 761-8436 or tfeeney@starledger.com.